Progress, new challenges seen for black Catholic community

Published: 2006-02-08

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- African-American Catholics have made strides in developing black Catholic leadership over the past two decades, but they face new challenges, said black Catholic leaders contacted at the start of Black History Month, which is observed each February. "There's still so much work that needs to be done," said Beverly Carroll, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for African-American Catholics in Washington. "We remain a marginalized group," Dominican Sister Jamie T. Phelps, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and director of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University in New Orleans, said in a phone interview with Catholic News Service. Auxiliary Bishop Joseph N. Perry of Chicago, chairman of the bishops' Committee on African-American Catholics, also interviewed by phone, said a lack of black priests and seminarians is a concern. Most U.S. African-American priests were ordained in the 1970s and 1980s, before vocations declined across the board, he said, and "they attended Catholic schools."

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